Senator TIERNEY (12:41 PM) —I plan today to continue my contribution to the policy debate on rural and regional Australia. I would like to begin by repeating what I said in the chamber last week, and that is that the big challenge in rural and regional Australia, particularly given the opening up of the Australian economy to the world, is that as we move towards deregulation and globalisation it is up to government at all levels—federal, state and local—to come up with effective strategies to assist the bush to survive in this new global environment.

The debate that we face on this is really between two points of view. One is to focus on the major centres and let the smaller centres just downsize naturally, without any assistance—in other words, perhaps recognising the imperatives of a global economy and saying, `Well, the more efficient way to run things is from the bigger centres, places like Dubbo, Wagga, Tamworth and Lismore, and the smaller centres will naturally fade away.' The other view is to empower all communities, including the smaller centres, to actually leverage themselves up under local leadership to find their niche in this new marketplace. Later on in this speech today I want to go into a number of examples, a number of cameos, of small centres which in a totally economic rationalist world you would think would decline and die but have shown that they have the ability to survive and, with a little bit of government assistance and with a little bit of leadership in the local area, to find their particular niche in the world.

I favour very much this second broad approach. The reality is that the larger centres, the Waggas, the Bathursts, the Tamworths and the Lismores, will survive anyway. They will survive against the Sydneys, the Melbournes and the Brisbanes because they have enough critical mass to grow. The thing that greatly concerns me, and I bring it to the attention of the Senate today, is that they are getting a lot of their growth and taking a lot of their strength from the surrounding countryside. I used to work for a number of years in Wagga in south-west New South Wales. If you look around Wagga, you see that what is happening is that the smaller centres are the ones that struggle as Wagga acts as a magnet to commerce. These are places like Junee, for example, 20 kilometres away, Cootamundra, Henty, The Rock, Mangoplah and Cookardinia—by the way, they had the greatest football team in the Riverina at the time; Mangoplah-Cookardinia United used to beat Wagga. So there is a great lot of spirit in some of these little centres. These are the ones that actually suffer as the big towns take up an increasing part of the economic framework of growth of a particular region.

So let us look at what has happened in recent times with the centralisation of commerce, with modern communications and technologies, and with modern transport means—people having greater access to cars. If you are like one of our senators who lives outside Junee, if you wanted to go shopping you might go to Junee or you might bypass that and go to Wagga, 20 kilometres away. So we have to actually build incentives into the system and help local leadership develop strategies so people are going to want to stay in local areas.

Certainly, they may go to big centres like Wagga to do a lot of their business. But we must give the smaller centres the opportunity to capture as much of that as possible so that not only the people who are actually in the little towns but also the people in the countryside will have a greater opportunity to stay in those centres. That will happen if we give this sort of assistance.

If we were not to move on strategies that would assist the small towns to survive, we would face, in terms of the whole landscape of Australia, a fairly bleak future. We would have a greatly depopulated landscape. We would have, under the alternative scenario, very few people outside the major centres. We would have rural holdings growing in size and therefore fewer people out on the land and we would have a lot fewer people in the towns that originally used to service those. So I am suggesting that maintaining a structure in rural Australia where we have big thriving centres and also have a series of increasingly thriving towns and villages is a lifestyle in this country which is worth fighting for.

I would like to emphasise the role of government in particular in the survival of these sorts of locations. I want to inform the Senate of the example of a place called Walcha. Walcha is a small area: it has a town population of 1,700 and a population in the surrounding areas of 3,500. It is up on the northern tablelands of New South Wales. It is fairly close to places like Armidale and Tamworth and it is feeling the effects of the competition of those bigger centres as people increasingly move to do their shopping and business in those larger centres. A place like Walcha, which you might think with that number of people will just wither and die, really has the opportunity to fight back and government has a role in helping the Walchas of this world survive. I will give you three examples of government initiatives in the Walcha area that will help bring that about.

The first relates to the major industry surrounding Walcha, which is the timber industry. We have regional forest agreements, and we have spent a lot of time debating them in this parliament in the last two weeks. We have a balance that we still have to get right in this country between conservation and development. We have in the forests surrounding Walcha and in the traditional management practices of the timber industry the opportunity to harvest and to renew those forests in an orderly manner.

But if the state government, which has prime control over the RFA in that area, gets it wrong, what will happen in Walcha will be just what will happen in the Hunter Valley and in many towns, such as Dungog and places like Stroud and Seaham. They will die because there is not enough timber to feed the mill, the mill shuts down, the timber workers do not have a job, all the support industries go out of business and the town declines. So that is a possible future facing Walcha if the state government does not get it right.

Interestingly enough, the federal government has a role in Walcha as well, and it is one which we may not realise. This is why I would like to draw it to the attention of the Senate. In Walcha is a very advanced veterin ary lab. It seems a strange place for this lab to be. It is a family business which has grown over the years and it has an international market for its product. As a matter of fact, most of its market is international because we have set up a regime—this must have been a long time ago—where the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation actually has a monopoly on some of the services that these people would like to provide. Why? It is a historical overhang which we should probably do something about because, if there are small businesses in country areas that can compete with the CSIRO, why should they not do so? This is a move that this parliament should take some interest in.

The other way in which the parliament has assisted Walcha relates to regional transaction centres, which we are setting up across the country. They are one of the major underpinnings of small country centres that can help them survive. We have seen over the years a wide range of government services disappear. Indeed, I am involved at the moment in a Senate committee inquiry, and its report which we are about to sign off—on unemployment and employment in regional Australia—has made it very clear that the government's role can be quite crucial. With regional transaction centres we have the opportunity now to rebuild the infrastructure that has been lost because of a range of government decisions.

In the case of one town, our report actually goes through what government facilities have been lost. When I looked through the list of facilities, I saw they were all state government things which have been shut down. Railways have been shut down as well as hospitals. Withdrawal of police services, the downsizing of the teaching service and a whole range of other things have been done by the state government.

What we have done federally is to come back and put in an underpinning through rural transaction centres. These are centres where people can undertake banking and a whole range of other types of activities that will help people stay in those areas. If you have to constantly drive from the farm, past the town, to the city, which might be 70 kilometres away, and come back, the pressure of living in that sort of isolated environment will drive people from the land in this country. With new technology we have seen the opportunities for that to come back.

We also had a great win for the bush recently in terms of that technology, which will give people in Walcha great heart—and in many other much more remote places—when Telstra last week launched in this parliament its Big Pond advance system, which is a way of communicating in the bush via satellite. Initially terrestrial systems will be used but, where that cuts out, the system will switch to the satellite. In terms of the number of megabits per second, we were talking about normal standards of 64, but this satellite system has a standard of 200 megabits per second. The bandwidth in remote Australia under this system will jump way past what is available in the cities. So let us chalk one up for the bush there.

Through government assisting the development of these sorts of new technologies, people can live in a place like Walcha and carry on their traditional business, but they can also develop, particularly via these new communication technologies, a whole range of other businesses. One of the great things that came out of the partial sale of Telstra is the fact that, under the rural communications infrastructure fund, we put aside money—initially a quarter of a billion dollars and, out of the last sale, more again—to support these sorts of developments and a whole range of little projects out in the bush that would improve communications between people who are living outside the big cities and the people who are in those big cities.

We really need to provide those opportunities further because, if you are running a business that is communications based, you can live in a place like Walcha and, provided you have that link in communications, run whatever your business is out of that area. We have the opportunity in the next 100 years to actually turn around this depopulating development that has occurred right through this century. I have mentioned before A.D. Hope's comment about the parasitic nature of the big cities and the fact that then there was a low population concentration in the country; that has now become lower. With new technology we can switch this right around and help people move out of the big cities to live in these beautiful areas that have a great lifestyle, and that will improve the lifestyle in country Australia. (Time expired)